There are a few extras included with this motherboard. ASUS have kept it down to minimize costs and they did not include the USB 3.0 front panel with this motherboard although they do include it with their more expensive options. It is a shame; I would have liked to see one with this board, especially when you consider that the ASRock P67 Extreme4 comes with one and is in a similar price bracket.

Software

When it comes down to installing the software for the motherboard, you can choose to install the software one by one or you can install all of them at once. In this case, everything was installed to ensure a fair test. The installation was straight forward. If you select the ‘InstAll’ option, the computer will install all of the drivers and restart a total of three times during the process of installation.

ASUS AI Suite II

The AI Suite II has a vast amount of programs installed within it. The program initially loads in a thin bar which allows you access the various parts of it by clicking on whichever part of the software you wish to use.

The Auto Tuning feature that you can see on the left is something which will automatically overclock your PC for you. There are two different pre-sets which are ‘Fast’ and ‘Extreme’. I have been over these in detail with my experiences in the overclocking section of this review.

ASUS FAN Xpert allows you to create custom fan profiles. You can choose from various preset settings as well as a ‘user’ option which allows you to change the fans to your requirements. When you choose the user option, you can choose where and when the fans start to ramp up. In all fairness, there are enough options within the FAN Xpert to satisfy most people but every one of us may have a slightly different perception of what the ideal settings should be.

Finally, we have the Update and System Information tabs. They pretty much speak for themselves - you can update your EFI revision from within Windows using this feature. If you want to update your EFI using this method, do this at your own risk. The best way to ensure a flawless update is at default EFI settings. The ‘System Information’ tells you about your CPU, motherboard and RAM, sort of like an in-built CPU-Z.

HDD burst speeds (reads) can surpass 3gbps. I just saw an article showing the Hitachi DeskStar 3TB 7K3000 can burst to about 5gbps...and just because you don't use more than two drives in a RAID array doesn't mean other people don't.Reply

He didn't say other people don't. He implied only few do. This is a $150 board, not an enthusiast model. Anyone willing to shell out a couple grand on their SSDs alone should look elsewhere for a board, or more likely an add-on PCI-e x8 card with REAL RAID support, to better suit their needs.Reply